The history of the PLO and the International
Legitimization of Terrorism

The Arabs' most spectacular success after
1973, however, has been to turn the international community into accomplices-albeit,
passive-in legitimising the instrument designed to destroy what would remain
of Israel after that withdrawal.

For the achievement of such complicity
by Western nations, accepted values of culture and civilisation had to
be thrown overboard. The international institutions within the United Nations
that were established to promote, to disseminate, and to perpetuate those
values had to be subverted and prostituted, and even the formal regulations
and norms protecting them in the Charter of the United Nations had to be
abused and undermined. The Arab states, however, encountered little resistance.

Thus, in November 1974, a year after the
Yom Kippur War, the world was treated to the spectacle of Yasser Arafat,
the leader of the Arab terrorists, a revolver showing at his hip, addressing
amid noisy acclaim the Assembly of the United Nations. Fourteen months
later, a representative of his organisation was seated as a participant-lacking
only the right to vote -- in a meeting of the Security Council.

On the Arab side, these developments were
neither sudden nor the fruit of spasmodic opportunism. They were well and
long thought out. They were the result of a clear change in tactics by
the Arab states after the oil and petrodollar weapon had proved its potency.,
Before the war, the pattern of their propaganda, their pressures, and their
strategy had been governed by the logic of geography: first the "erasure
of the consequences of the 1967 War"-that is, Israeli withdrawal to the
1949 Armistice lines-and then the concentrated physical attack on the attenuated
Israel by a sea of Arabs, all wearing "Palestinian" uniforms and fighting
for the "restoration of their legitimate rights": that is, the elimination
of Israel.

When the American pressure began to bear
fruits, when Israel had physically given up part of the gains of 1967,
and the further consummation of the Arabs' objective seemed to them no
longer in doubt, they changed the order of priorities. It became possible
at once -- without waiting for the gradual process of Israeli withdrawal-to
establish the diplomatic basis for the most radical part of their dream:
the creation, in the public consciousness, of the "Palestine State" on
the rains of Israel. To this end, considerable diplomatic activity was
required-for co-ordination among the Arab states themselves, for co-ordination
with the Soviet bloc and with the submissive African states--to test the
reactions of the Western states, the degree of passivity with which they
would swallow the project.

The terrorist organisations had certainly
come----or been brought-a long way since their crushing defeat in Jordan.
The Arab states had then acted, swiftly to ensure the speedy rehabilitation
of their proteges. Some latitude, to be sure, had to be given them in executing
at least some symbolic revenge on Jordan. But the promise and the arrangements
for their continued existence, for quartering them (mainly in Lebanon),
for financing their arms, their training and their propaganda, were necessarily
accompanied by the condition that they concentrate their main effort against
the Israeli enemy.

Symbolic revenge found expression in the
appearance of a new organisation that called itself Black September, in
memory of the events in Jordan in 1970. The first operation claimed by
the organisation was appropriately a blow against Jordan. On November 28,
1971, King Hussein's Prime Minister, Wasfi el Tal, was shot down in a Cairo
street. The four assailants did not resist arrest. They were not put on
trial but were subsequently simply released by Egyptian authorities.

In fact, Black September was not a new
organisation at all. The nature of its operations, the new dimension of
brutality which -became its hallmark, made it convenient for Fatah and
its leader to avoid identification with it.

Most of its activities in the next two
years were carried out at a distance from Israel. They consisted mainly
of efforts to attack civilian airplanes-on the ground at Rome or Athens
airports-or by means of stratagems. For example, a gift chivalrously given
to an unsuspecting girlfriend flying on an El Al plane to Israel, contained
a time-bomb. Most dramatic of their exploits were the attacks on unsuspecting
groups of people, related or unrelated to Israel, in airplanes or elsewhere,
and holding them as hostages against the satisfaction of various demands.
Usually these included the release of prisoners, jailed in Israel or other
counties as well as money and safe conduct to one of the Arab states. Arab
terrorism now became also part of an international phenomenon. Liason and
mutual co-operation was widely reported with terrorist groups in Italy,
Germany, Ireland, and elsewhere.

Thus, the one major act of terror carried
out on Israel itself was the 1972 attack by three Japanese terrorists at
Lod Airport. Landing from a plane on March 25, they took up positions in
the airport's arrival hall and machine-gunned their fellow passengers.
They killed twenty-seven people, including twenty pilgrims from Puerto
Rico who had come to celebrate Easter in the Holy Land. Eighty others were
wounded.1

Black September's own tour de force that
year was performed in Munich, Germany. There, in September, they murdered
eleven Israeli athletes who had come to participate in the 1972 Olympic
Games. They had first trapped them, unguarded and unarmed as they were,
in their sleeping quarters.

As though to flaunt its special tactics
of warfare, Black September carried out an act of equal Wantonness six
months later. This time, for reasons unexplained, the chosen field of battle
was inside Arab territory: the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Khartoum, capital
of Sudan, where the ambassador was giving a party. The attackers had no
difficulty getting in, nor in subduing five unarmed diplomats and taking
them captive into another part of the building. They soon released the
two Arabs among them: the host, and a Jordanian. Many hours of negotiations
then followed with Sudanese authorities. To this end, the terrorists reported
and received orders by radio communication with Beirut. Then the three
remaining captives-a Belgian and two Americans-were shot dead in the chairs
to which they had been tied. The killers were arrested.

There were perhaps some valid inter-Arab
reasons for the operation, but the Sudanese authorities, in their anger,
now publicly dispelled whatever doubt may have existed about the authenticity
of Black September. They announced and published documents proving that
Black September was indeed none other than Fatah, and that the organiser
of the killing in Khartoum was in fact the local official representative
of Fatah. Sudan's Vice President later announced that the order to kill
had come by code on the radio from Fatah headquarters in Beirut. Later,
unofficial reports added that the order had been given personally by Yasser
Arafat. Arafat now admitted that "there are some Fatah members in Black
September." A member of Fatah, captured in Jordan, revealed that the operative
leader of Black September was Arafat's deputy, Salah Halef, known as Abu
Ayad.

The massacre at Munich had evoked expressions
horror throughout the Western world. The terrorists knew no bounds after
the gruesome event in Khartoum The American government demanded that Sudan
deal with the murderers with due severity, and newspapers throughout the
world called for countermeasures against this new barbarity. The New York
Times expressed the view that it was "inconceivable" that Black September
should be allowed to exist. Then sentiments failed, or pretended to fail,
to understand the realities.

But by the time the Yom Kippur War broke
out nobody could continue to feign ignorance of the fact that Black September
was Fatah, just as Fatah and its sister organisations were a completely
integrated arm of the Arab states. There, each new operation was greeted
with public approval and enthusiasm. The only Arab government that officially
announced its active role in the world-wide operation of Black September
was.2 In fact, all the requirements of the
terrorists were placed at their disposal by one or another of the Arab
states as required, and the embassies of the Arab states, in carefree disregard
of all international agreements and procedures, became bases for terrorist
activities.3

Arab perpetrators of terrorist acts found
sanctuary, when they needed it, in the Arab states (except Jordan). In
some cases, they were given public receptions as heroes; in others, they
were quickly removed from the public eye and returned to their base. Sudan
had reacted to the murder of the diplomats and had responded to the horror-stricken
reactions in the United States by emphatic, unequivocal, and repeated undertakings
to punish the murderers. But in fact, after a while, the Sudanese government
packed the murderers off to Egypt where Sadat freed them without fuss.

The Yom Kippur War presented Yasser Arafat
and his organisation with a great opportunity. Suddenly the Israeli Army
was engaged heavily on two fronts and was plunged into dire difficulties.
Large numbers of Israeli Reserve soldiers were being moved to the fronts,
and civilian life in Israel was suddenly in a state of upheaval. Here was
a favourable, even ideal, set of circumstances for major action-to set
up a third front: to divert Israeli forces to the "Fatah front" on the
Lebanese border, to attack Israeli Army installations and forces behind
the lines in Judea and Samaria and indeed on the roads and in the cities
of Israel. This is what might have been expected by those throughout the
world who, on radio and television and in the newspapers, absorbed the
daily ration of information on the size and prowess of the Palestinians.
Nothing of the sort happened, however. Neither Fatah nor any of its sister
organisations played any noticeable part in Yom Kippur War.

It was only after the war, in the gloom
and atmosphere of defeat that had been induced in Israel by the revelation
of the unwarranted shortcomings and blunders at its opening, by its heavy
toll of casualties, and by the crushing cruelty of American pressure at
its conclusion, that the Arab terrorist organisations mounted a new series
of operations. Now they no longer used the camouflage of Black September,
but explicitly that of their collective identity -- "Palestine Liberation
Organisation"---or of one of its constituent bodies. Now, indeed, they
operated, mostly from their bases in Lebanon, against and inside Israel
itself.

The onslaught began in the spring of 1974.
During that year, in addition to a number of smaller operations -- such
as the flinging (by two non-Arab allies from abroad) of hand grenades from
the balcony of a Tel Aviv theatre into the crowd below-they launched a
dozen major attacks. Some were nipped in the bud; a number succeeded. Several
places in northern Israel were thus added to the annals of Arab achievement,
gaining a sombre fame throughout the world: Nahariyah, Beit She'an, Shamir.
The pattern of these attacks was exemplified by the events at Kiryat Shmoneh
and Ma'alot.

Kiryat Sh'moneh is a village in the mountains
of Galilee close to the Lebanese border. It was there that the PLO opened
its offensive. Shortly before dawn on April 11, 1974, three of its members,
two Syrians a one Iraqi, went into an empty schoolhouse on the outskirts
and, as dawn broke, fired into the street. Upon the arrival of Israeli
soldiers who returned their fire, they found a way out of the building,
crossed a street, and went into an apartment building. They entered an
apartment and, using Kalashnikov automatic rifles, shot Mrs. Esther Cohen,
age forty, her seventeen-year-old son David, and her daughter, Shula, age
fourteen. They then went quickly to other apartments in the building. Some
they entered, firing at the occupants, most of whom were eating breakfast;
into others they simply threw hand grenades. In the noise and confusion
of the next ten minutes, they made their way into the adjacent building
to continue their attack. By the time the Israeli soldier’s caught up with
them and shot them, they had killed six more Israelis between the ages
of two-and-a-half and eleven as well as eight civilian adults. Sixteen
men, women, and children were wounded but survived, and Israeli soldiers
were killed.

Even more spectacular was the operation
a month Later at Ma'alot, a village somewhat farther from the Lebanese
border. Here the attackers arrived earlier in the day, at 3:00 A.M., when
everybody was asleep. They knocked at the door of one apartment and one
of called out in Hebrew: "Police! There are terrorists around!" When the
door was opened, the terrorists entered and shot Yosef Cohen, his wife
Fortuna, and their four-year-old son Eli. They also shot the daughter,
five-year-old Beah, but she survived. From the Cohen apartment, the terrorists
went across the road again to a school. But this school was not empty.
Housed in it were more than one hundred high-school pupils on a hiking
tour from Safed, resting for the night. The attackers woke the sleeping
children and, wielding their Kalashnikovs, herded them, together with their
teachers, into the hallway. Some of the children and one of the teachers
succeeded in slipping and escaped by jumping out of a window. The rest
were held for fourteen hours. When Israeli soldiers rushed the building,
the Arabs fired into the crowd of children, hitting eighty-four of them.
Twenty were either killed instantly or later died of their injuries.

These operations were hailed with enthusiasm
by the communications media in all the Arab states. They were described
later that year by Farouk El Kadoumi, leader of the Fatah delegation to
the Conference of Foreign Ministers of the Arab States at Rabat, as "great
operations of military heroism."

The cries of horror that resounded throughout
the West did not inhibit the great diplomatic offensive maintained by the
Arab states throughout that year. Its first stage was brought to a successful
conclusion by the end of 1974. Arafat himself was active in the offensive,
moving from one Arab capital to another, and twice visiting Moscow in April
and July.4 He had also had an earlier meeting
in March with the Soviet Foreign Minister in Cairo, after which Mr. Gromyko
sounded the keynote of the diplomatic offensive: He announced that the
Soviet Union regarded the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinians.

It was on October 14, 1974, that the concentrated
effect of Arab power was dramatically demonstrated. On that day, 105 member
states of the United Nations voted to invite Yasser Arafat to address the
Assembly on the Palestine problem. The moral significance of the vote was
minor. Over the years, the automatic majority of the totalitarian, the
anti-democratic, and the captive blocs had long turned the United Nations
into a forum, pathetic yet potentially dangerous, whose deliberations bore
little or no relation any longer to its high purpose. Now it was not only
condoning murder and barbarity and legitimising the threat of politicide
and genocide, it was destroying its own formal legitimacy as an organisation
of recognised states with recognised minimal criteria. Among the 105 states,
France and Italy also raised supporting hands, and of the other Western
states, only three (apart from Israel)-Bolivia, the Dominican Republic,
and the United States-were bold enough to vote in opposition. The rest
abstained.5

Now, too, the French government hastened
to seek a further advantage over its fellow Western Europeans in subservience
to the power-wielding Arabs. Foreign Minister Jean Sauvagnargues, paying
an official visit to the Middle East, made his way first to Beirut and
there (October 21) became the first Western Foreign Minister to shake the
hand of Yasser Arafat. He greeted him effusively as "Mr. President" and,
at a press conference, publicly pronounced his considered judgement of
Arafat as "a moderate leader" possessed of "the stature of a statesman"
who was "following a constructive path." He did not elaborate. These events
took place eighteen months after the slaughter of Western diplomats in
Khartoum and five months after the massacre of children at Ma’alot

The stage was now set for the Arab states
to legitimise formally their intention to replace Israel with a "democratic,
secular State." On October 29, 1974, the heads of the Arab states met in
conference in Rabat, Morocco, and passed resolutions

(a) Reaffirming "the right of the Palestinian
people to return to its Homeland";

(b) Reaffirming "the right of the Palestinian
people to set up an independent national authority, under the leadership
of the Palestine Liberation Organisation as the sole legitimate representative
of the Palestinian people, in every part of Palestine liberated. The Arab
States are obligated to support this authority, from the moment of its
establishment, in all spheres and at all levels";

(c) Expressing "support for the Palestine
Liberation Organisation in exercising its national and international responsibility
within the framework of Arab undertakings."

The decisions at Rabat were unanimous.
Hussein of Jordan who was deprived by the Rabat resolutions of any backing
for his own claim to western Palestine, had long resigned himself to the
reality that the terrorist movement was the more effective instrument for
eliminating Israel. He could only hope that his acquiescence Might evoke
from the PLO a similar forbearance about leaving Transjordan in his hands,
which, after all, they (correctly) regarded as eastern Palestine, and where
in fact most of the Palestinian Arabs lived. He had long since been readmitted
into the Arab fold. Egypt and Syria had re-established relations with him
on the eve of the October war, and he had then released the remaining tefforists-756
in number-from his jails.

The resolutions were passed unanimously.
President Sadat of Egypt, widely advertised by Western apologists as a
"moderate," did not pretend to try to introduce even a semantic modification
of their plain language Moreover, whoever wished to could find many pronouncements
by him or by other Egyptian authorities on their identity of purpose with
the "Palestinians." What Sadat intended for the Jews of Israel he had in
plain in his widely publicised oath a year before Yom Kippur War. He had
sworn in the Cairo mosque to restore the Jews to the condition described
in Koran: "to be persecuted, oppressed and wretched." It was Egypt's leading
weekly journal, Al-Musswar, that had spelt out in political terms precisely
what was intended when the "legitimate rights" had been restored.

"The English word peace," wrote the editor
of journal on December 7, 1973, "can be translated Arabic as both sulh
and salaam, whereas in Arabic there is a difference between the
two."

Israel, he explained, could indeed expect
salaam in exchange for a surrender to present Arab territorial demands
(that is, to withdraw to the Armistice lines of 1949).

But sulh is another thing altogether.
Sulh
means that the Jews of Palestine-and I repeat and emphasize the expression,
Jews of Palestine-will return to their senses and dwell under one roof
and under one flag with the Arabs of Palestine, in a secular state devoid
of any bigotry or racialism, proportional to their respective numerical
ratio in 1948. By this I mean that the original Palestinian Jews and their
children and grandchildren shall remain on the Palestinian soil will live
there with the original Palestinian Arabs. The Jews who came from abroad
will return to their countries of origin, where they lived as did their
forefathers before 1948-for these countries bear them no ill will.This article was a faithful paraphrase of
the text the constitution of the PLO-the so-called Palestine Covenant.

A fortnight after the Rabat Conference,
clothed now with the unambiguous authority of the whole Arab world, Yasser
Arafat delivered his address to the United Nations Assembly. His appearance
was timed to coincide with the presidency for that month of an Arab, President
Boumedienne of Algeria, who duly accorded to Arafat at the podium the treatment
previously accorded only to heads of state. Nobody objected, nobody commented.
Arafat did not disappoint his sponsors. Mounting a Soviet-style attack
on imperialism and colonialism of which Zionism was the handmaiden, and
repeating a fine selection of the calumnies, gathered together by Arab
calumniators of Zionism and the Jewish people, he called for world support
for the elimination of the State of Israel and its replacement by a democratic,
secular State of Palestine. He did, however, make a concession to Western
susceptibilities. Not all the Jews who had arrived after 1948 would be
deported. The Jews living in Israel could stay there, provided they agreed
to accept whatever fate awaited them in the "democratic, secular State."

The favouring wind that blew up for Arab
ambitions after the October war had by now reached gale force. The campaign
continued to accustom the world to the Nazistic idea that it would not
be bad for the world if the Jewish state disappeared. Meantime, however,
circumstances had made it possible for the Arabs to eliminate two other
obstacles disturbing the homogeneity of Arab Moslem domination throughout
the area between the Persian Gulf and the Atlantic Ocean.

One of these was the Kurds in Iraq, a Moslem
but non-Arabic nation; the other the Christians of Lebanon. The Kurds,
who had no state of their own, had been fighting for a generation in their
contiguous territory in northern Iraq, not indeed for independence, but
for autonomy within the Iraqi Arab state. Except for the occasions when
they made promises (which were never kept) to grant such autonomy, successive
Iraqi governments had tried without success to crush the Kurds by force.

Fierce and bloody resistance to Iraqi power
was supported by Iranian arms, with United States backing. Iran’s support
was a function of her ongoing dispute with Iraq about the sovereignty over
the waterway dividing them. With the growingly profitable common oil interest
and, presumably, prodded by the Arab League, the Iraqis, meeting the Iranians
at an OPEC meeting in Morocco in March 1975, made concessions in return
for an Iranian abandonment of the Kurds. The Kurds were accorded one gesture.
Those who wished to escape the mercies of the Arabs would, within a brief
time limit, be allowed to cross the border into Iran and would be given
sanctuary as refugees.

Inside the Kurdish region, the Iraqi government
speedily applied plans for a final solution of the "problem." It would
be done by degrees.

Nearly 80 percent of the agricultural produce
of the region was "bought" by the Iraqi government at a very low price,
thus reducing the means of livelihood for the population. Moreover, nearly
all doctors and medical personnel were transferred from the Kurdish region.

A plan to settle large numbers of Egyptians
in the Kurdish region, and the building of three new towns for the purpose,
was publicly described in an advertisement in AI-Ahram of Cairo.

Should nothing happen to disturb the process,
the
Kurdish entity was well launched for extinction.

The assault in Lebanon began a month later.
It was not a walkover. Here was the only Arab state in which the Moslems
had to share power and even to accept a minor share in it. Indeed, the
original raison d'être and the whole modem history of Lebanon was
primarily of a Christian enclave, of a haven for Christians in an unfriendly
Moslem environment. In recent years in particular, with the increasing
discomforts and unease suffered by Christians in some of the Arab states,
Christian immigrants from those countries were being absorbed by Lebanon.6
By the agreed Lebanese Constitution of 1943, the President and the Commander-in-Chief
of the Army were always Christians, while a Moslem was Prime Minister.
A Moslem was also Speaker in the Parliament, but the Christians held a
majority of its seats.

The intolerance of Moslems to a status
of less than domination had twice in the recent past led to violent efforts
to put an end to this Christian predominance. On the last occasion, in
1958, order had been restored only after the United States had intervened
by sending in Marines.

The Christians, well organised, forewarned
by the new spirit of exhilaration and militancy that gripped the Arab Moslem
world after the Yom Kippur War and by the ominous direction and thrust
of American diplomacy, prepared for trouble. But they were faced by a coalition
of forces. Their own Moslem neighbours, armed with weapons from Syria,
were reinforced by the Arab terrorist organisations now filling without
inhibition the role of executors of the pan-Arab will.

Incredibly, the fighting went on for months,
mainly in Beirut, the capital. Large sections of the once flourishing westernised
city, banking and business metropolis of all the Arab states, were reduced
to rubble, and day after day tens, and later hundreds, of people, mostly
civilians, were killed. After a year of civil war, at least twenty thousand
people had perished.

By then the political objective of the
Moslem onslaught had been accomplished. Whatever the precise future organisation
of the country turned out to be, Christian predominance had been brought
to an end. The army had been broken up into its religious components, and
had in fact disintegrated as a viable force. The Christian President, whose
resignation was demanded by the Moslem insurgents, was finally replaced
by a cowed majority vote in a besieged Parliament; his successor was a
Christian nominated by the Syrians.

The continued shelling and shooting reflected
the sense of desperation of the Christians, who could not reconcile themselves
to defeat. But more incisive was the fact that the Moslems, having achieved
the essential political victory, quarrelled over the spoils.

The Syrian government now found the moment
ripe to achieve her own special objective: to take the affairs of Lebanon
under her control as a first step toward the creation of the long-dreamed-of
Greater Syria. Yet the Lebanese Moslems had believed that the struggle
and indeed the sacrifice had been for their benefit. The terrorist organisations,
who had-played their full part in reducing the Christians, regarded it
as their natural right to play a dominant role in deciding the fate of
Lebanon.

The grotesquerie of the events was now
made complete. The Christian nations, who with more or less embarrassment
had throughout the months kept silent and turned their faces from the slaughter
that Syria had generated and sustained, now welcomed her, and the troops
she sent into Lebanon, as a "peacemaker."

The precise roles and relationship of the
Syrians, the Lebanese Moslems, and the Palestinian terrorist organisations
would soon crystallise. The reduction of the penultimate vestige of non-Moslem
sovereignty in the Arab world would now also bring about, along the southern
Lebanese border, a fourth front manned by a variety of Arabs, all in "Palestinian"
uniforms, for the final reduction of Israel-the last obstacle to the "unity
of the Arab world."

Pending the realisation of their ideal
of Israel's physical elimination, the Arab states pursued with undiminished
vigour the preparatory gnawing and nibbling at Israel’s status as a member
of the community of nations. Their tactics were strikingly similar to those
of the Nazis: to disseminate an image of Israel-and of the Jewish people-as
black, as negative, and as hateful as could be conjured up by their own
fertile imaginations and by the anti-Semitic outpourings of the ages, so
that when the time and the opportunity came to destroy Israel physically,
the normal reactions, even of civilised people, would be blunted and minimal.
At the same time, they accustomed the world to spectacles symbolising the
supplanting of Israel by the "Palestinians."

They had as yet no hope of achieving Israel's
expulsion from the United Nations or even of the application of sanctions
against her-both decisions subject to veto by the Security Council-but
in the meantime they secured majority decisions denouncing Israel and indeed
the concept of Jewish nationalism in a number of international bodies unconcerned
with politics. They succeeded even in having Israel expelled from the regional
section of UNESCO to which she belonged (and to whose work she contributed
far beyond her logical share). The protests and resignations of intellectuals,
artists, and scientists throughout the world were to no avail. Thus, also,
Israel was excluded from Asian sporting bodies. And, thus, the United Nations
Assembly passed a resolution equating Zionism with racism.

This last obscenity was indeed too much
for the Western nations to stomach. Not only did they not hide their disgust,
but thirty-four of them voted against the solution.

Yet this isolated act of protest revealed
all the more sharply the supine resignation of the Western nations toward
nearly all the other Arab-Soviet orchestrated efforts to turn Israel into
a pariah state, and which had already made a grotesque caricature of the
United Nations organisation. Mr. Abba Eban, the former Foreign Minister
of Israel, once remarked-before the Yom Kippur War-that if the Arabs were
to introduce a resolution at the UN declaring the earth to be flat, they
would get forty supporting votes. In the now enlarged United Nations, and
in today's circumstances, they would probably muster 110. And the Western
nations would abstain. This is the essence of their record on the Arabs'
hate campaign against Israel. Afraid to offend the Arabs, yet unable to
support them in conscience, or where no plausible excuse was available,
they would seek discreet refuge in abstention, however absurd, irrelevant,
or outrageous the Arab resolution might be.7

On the other hand, the Western nations
equally supinely showed no resistance to the seating of the PLO on various
international bodies engaged in practical day-to-day activities, treating
that organisation as though it were a national authority relating to the
territory of Palestine.8

It is weird and depressing to see the rapists
of Czechoslovakia and those who savaged Yemen, the destroyers of the Kurds
and those who murdered South Sudanese, the vicious racists from Uganda
and the begetters of the bloodbath in Lebanon, conferring in the corridors
of the United Nations in amity and parliamentary decorum with the spokesmen
for Western civilisation, wrestling over a formula for their diverse, selfish
(or imagined) interest that would somehow break the resistance and the
spirit of Israel, while all aver that their only objects are peace and
justice. As long as this collaboration continues, there can neither peace
nor justice in Palestine, but at best cease-fire with recurring Arab efforts
at attrition.

1. Two the
attackers were killed or committed suicide. The third, Kozo Okomoto, was
tried and sentenced to life imprisonment. The three were members of a Japanese
organisation called the United Red Army.

2. On June
11, 1972.

3. A comprehensive
survey of Black September was published by Christopher Dobson in a series
of articles in the London Daily Telegraph in July 1973.

4. Arafat
had paid six earlier publicised visits to Moscow in preceding two years.

6. See Bernard
Lewis, "The Return of Islam," Commentary, January 1976.

7. When Mr.
Baroudi, the delegate for Saudi Arabia, announced that the Holocaust was
a Zionist invention, the Western delegates remained silent and unruffled,
except for a belated few words of correction by the British delegate. When
Baroudi added that the story of Anne Frank had never happened, even the
Dutch delegate remained silent. When Baroudi quoted "an important Swedish
newspaper," no Swede rose even to explain that he was referring an obscure
neo-Nazi scandal sheet.

8. Much of
the time of these bodies is of course now spent debating fantastic charges
against Israel.

This page was produced by Joseph
E. KatzMiddle Eastern Political and Religious
History Analyst Brooklyn, New York E-mail
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